Brad that's what Windows does when it thinks there is no hard disk attached, or no valid boot sector on your hard disk. (or thinks that the hard drive is not a boot device, as opposed to a cd/dvd rom)
Something between something as trivial as a loose cable, to complete hard disk failure has occurred. I guess another longshot is that your cmos battery went dead, and your bios lost the boot priority settings, but that's really rare. But also much cheaper. An even more obscure possibility is that your motherboard is defective.
If its worst case (and most likely) scenario, you can probably still retrieve data (pictures, music, spreadsheets, not programs - they usually need to be installed by attaching that hard drive to a functioning, booting pc configured as a slave drive (configured by jumpers on HD, probably set to autodetect so it would just work), and then copying anything you want from it, to the local hard disk. But again, that process will do nothing for applications & games. You'll need to reinstall those.
Some or all data may not be retrievable, but seldom does an entire hard disk go bad, its usually only sectors. Either way, chances are that unless a cable got knocked loose, that you will need a new HD, a fresh windows install, and reinstall of all games and programs.
Given the nature of the problem, thtb's suggestion would do nothing, since as far as I know, linux doesn't boot off of bad hard drives either.
Happy New Year.
